Descartes's mechanistic interpretation (Discours de la Méthode [1637]) of biological phenomena as automata, links back to the mimetic technologies of Plato and Aristotle. As Georges Canguilhem has argued:

The construction of a mechanical model presupposes a living original [...]. The platonic Demiurge copies the ideas, and the Idea is the model of which the natural object is a copy. The Cartesian God, the Artifex maximus, works to produce something equivalent to the living body itself. The model for the living machine is that body itself. Divine art imitates the Idea -- but the Idea is the living body. [1]

Canguilhem's discussion of Descartes points to one way in which technology has been made to relate to a "non-technological" world, according to the old philosophical dualism physis/techne, which works to sustain the fallacy that techne is somehow "opposed" to physis.

Notes

1. Georges Canguilhem, "Machine and Organism," Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone Books, 1992) 53. Cf. "Sixth Meditation" in Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967).